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Appendix: Detailed Data

Collection Methodology Collection of Professor Names

In order to identify university-derived patents by the inventor, the names of professors at the U15 were compiled. For the Ontario universities, the names were collected from the Ontario public sector disclosure of salaries over $100,000 for 2016 (commonly known as the “Sunshine List”). The names of professors at the U15 outside of Ontario were collected from their online directories; for some universities, a school-wide directory was used, except if one was unavailable or incomplete, in which case it was targeted by department or faculty.

The professors of interest exclude retired professors and professors emeriti, adjuncts and lecturers. They are limited predominantly to those in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, which are most likely to cover patentable subject matter. While actual coverage varies depending on the academic focus of the university, this includes science, engineering, math, medicine, surgery, agricultural, environmental, pharmaceutical, computer science and information management faculties and departments.

As the U15 is composed of six Ontario universities, some of which are among the largest in terms of faculty size, using an already-compiled list saved considerable time compared to collecting the names from the source. Furthermore, as the professors within the scope of this study are likely to be among the higher-paying positions in universities, this deviation in methodology is not unreasonable.

Collection of Patents

Using the PatSnap database, a search was run for the professor names as inventors.1 PatSnap is an IP intelligence platform that offers in-application analysis and metrics and the ability to export patent records that have been merged with additional information about the patent, including initial and current assignees and legal status, and standardized to allow for searching and comparison across many patent office databases worldwide. Such databases are often used by IP professionals for due diligence but also serve a secondary purpose for academic research. For this paper, the search and export functions were used to collect the data, with the remaining analysis performed in the statistical programming language R. In addition to the exported data, PatSnap’s custom value metric is also collected; the measure is based on patent and technology indicators as well as market valuation.2

1 A subset of the University of Manitoba professors was not included in the original professor name scraping; the patent records for these professors had to be collected after the initial analysis using the EPO’s Espacenet database (www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/technical/ espacenet.html#tab-1). Status and assignment data were pulled from the INPADOC database information on Espacenet. The required variables were then reformatted to fit the PatSnap data.

Patents were collected by searching for combinations of the professors’ first and last names as inventors (middle names and initials were excluded at this stage), and addresses of inventors that contain CA, Canada, or the name or abbreviation of a province. The search was limited to granted patents and applications filed with the USPTO, CIPO and EPO. Professors listed in directories with only a first initial were discarded from the search (accounting for less than five percent of all names collected and as high as 15 percent for Saskatchewan).

Identifying Correct Inventor/ Professor Matches

The exported patent records were analyzed using the statistical programming language R. The inventors and assignees and their respective addresses were extracted into separate data sets. Patents with inventors whose middle names or initials conflicted with the professor’s name were filtered out. False matches due to common names and the same abbreviation referring to Canada and California were also filtered out using the steps below.

The format and completeness of inventors’ addresses vary. Addresses were disambiguated into state or province (for the United States and Canada only) and country codes by matching patterns based on unique country codes, postal and zip codes, and place names (such as cities, towns and counties) in California and the Canadian provinces. Where the location was still unclear, such as with city names in multiple jurisdictions and partial or missing addresses, a number of steps were taken to provide a best estimate of the state or province and country. These steps include selecting the highest-occurring location that was assigned to other inventors with the same name and a similar address across all patents, and coinventors on the same patent. Where an obvious match was not made, the inventor location was flagged for manual review. The patents were further filtered to keep only those where the matching inventor’s province was the same as that of the university (inventors matched to professors at universities in Montreal or Ottawa were acceptable if located in either Quebec or Ontario). Where the province was not identified, the patent was not removed if the matching inventor was in Canada.

2 The input variables for this valuation are technology class codes, litigation history, claims history, age of the patent, characteristics of the assignee, number of inventors and value of the market covered by the patent family (https://blog.patsnap.com/japanese-interface-custom-fields-patent-value).

The professor-inventor matches were manually reviewed and confirmed if the professor’s name was matched to multiple permutations of inventor names (for example, different middle names or initials), or if the professor’s name appeared multiple times in the data set and was composed of common first and last names. For first names, this includes John, David, Brian, Jean, Michael, Pierre and James. Surnames include Thomson, Brown, White, Smith and Anderson. They were excluded if technology codes and patent titles diverged from the professor’s stated research and interests per their profiles on the university’s website or their personal websites. This last step served to remove false matches that could significantly bias the general results. Top-ranking professors (those with five or more granted patent families) with industry partners were also reviewed, and any patent families with priority or application years preceding their tenure with the university, as indicated in university profiles and personal websites, were removed.

Identifying Assignees

The state or province and country of initial assignees were identified in the same way as those of inventors. At the time the data was exported, the address of the current assignees was not included. The current assignee’s location could still be determined if it was also an initial assignee on that or any other patent in the data set, was the name of an inventor, or if it could be inferred from the name (for example, Héma-Québec).

Assignee names were then standardized by removing punctuation, abbreviating company suffixes (for example, “Corp.” instead of

“Corporation”) and removing leading or trailing instances of “The.” Variations on frequently occurring assignee names, such as the U15, were standardized to one variation using pattern matching (for example, any assignee name containing some spelling variation of “University” and “Manitoba” was corrected to be “University of Manitoba”). Misspelled assignee names were corrected to the highest-occurring version of the name out of the assignee names that were “close” to each other as determined by the Levenshtein edit distance (the number of edits needed to transform one character string into another). Once standardized, assignee names were classified as inventors, initial assignees and/or current assignees, allowing for a single list of all entities named on each patent.

Identifying Entity Type and Corporate Group of Assignees

Assignees were classified as individuals (mostly inventors) or as academic and government institutions (identified by keywords in the name, for example, “Institute,” “Hospital,” “Minister”), with the remainder classified as industry assignees. In order to identify the country of the parent company as the ultimate beneficiary of the patent, the industry assignee names were merged with Canadian mergers and acquisitions records from the Thomson Reuters Eikon platform and company hierarchies from LexisNexis Academic. As it was not possible to bulk download company hierarchies, they were only looked up for key multinational companies and industry assignees that appeared in the data set more than a handful of times. Remaining assignees were assigned their own name and location as that of the group. Where no address was identified, it was manually added based on a basic internet search. Results throughout the paper are reported based on the corporate group name and location, if applicable.

Converting from Assets to Families

Results are reported by patent family. Inventors and initial and current assignees are given equal weight for the patent family regardless of the number of patents on which they are named. The PatSnap value of a patent family is calculated as the maximum value of any patent in the family.

Definitions

Applicant: Individual or organization who files a patent application with a patent office.

Assignee: A party who receives patent rights transferred from the owner.

Assignor: An owner who transfers patent rights to another party.

Claims: The part of a patent that defines the legal boundaries of the invention.

FTO: The ability of a company to commercialize a technology while navigating the existing positions, including IP positions, of other actors. For example, if other actors own patents that prevent a company from entering a marketplace, the company’s FTO has been limited by the IP positions of the other actors. In effect, FTO influences a company’s competitiveness.

Granted patent: A patent application that has been found allowable by a patent office and grants the owner an exclusive right to prevent others from making, using or selling an invention defined by the claims of the patent.

Patent: A patent is a government grant that gives the owner the right to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention that is the subject matter of the claims of a granted patent. A patent usually has a 20-year term from the date of filing of the patent application.

Patent application: A document filed with a patent office that includes a written description of the invention and claims. The document is examined by the patent office to determine if it complies with the formal and legal requirements to be granted as a patent.

Patent family: A collection of patent applications covering the same or similar technical content. The applications in a family are related to each other through priority claims and may be filed in one or more jurisdictions. A “parent application” is the patent application that a member of a family cites priority to or originates from. Applications filed in other jurisdictions that are part of the same family, carry the same priority filing date as other members of the patent family.